CHAPTER XXVII
BYRON’S RELATIONS WITH THE COUNTESS GUICCIOLI AND HER HUSBAND AT RAVENNA
Countess Guiccioli speaks of Byron’s regard for her as “the serious attachment which he had wished to avoid, but which had mastered his whole heart, and induced him to live an isolated life with the person he loved in a town of Romagna, far from all that could flatter his vanity and from all intercourse with his countrymen.” The account is not altogether inaccurate, but it omits one important fact: the Countess’s own resolute insistence that Byron’s society was essential to her happiness and even to her life.
At first, it seems clear, his sole objective was the seduction of his neighbour’s wife. He was engaged, as he thought, upon an affair not of sentiment but of gallantry; and he had no idea that his neighbour’s wife, having consented to be seduced, would expect him to dance attendance on her for ever afterwards. So much seems evident from the letter in which he complains of being dragged to Ravenna in a blazing Italian June. His mistress, however, had compelled him to come by pleading illness; and she did not scruple to repeat that plea as often as she found any difficulty in getting her own way. “I am ill—so ill. Send for Lord Byron or I shall die;” that was the refrain which helped her to reorganise her life.
Having joined her at Ravenna, Byron, as we have seen, accompanied her to Bologna. It was at Bologna that he wrote the love letter, quoted in the preceding chapter, in Madame Guiccioli’s copy of “Corinne.” From Bologna, too, he wrote to Murray, asking him to use his influence to procure Count Guiccioli a nomination as British Vice-Consul—an unsalaried office which would entitle him to British protection in the event of political disturbances; and at Bologna, finally, occurred Countess Guiccioli’s second diplomatic indisposition.
“Some business,” she told Moore, “having called Count Guiccioli to Ravenna, I was obliged by the state of my health, instead of accompanying him, to return to Venice, and he consented that Lord Byron should be the companion of my journey. We left Bologna on September 15.... When I arrived at Venice, the physicians ordered that I should try the country air; and Lord Byron, having a Villa at La Mira, gave it up to me, and came to reside there with me. At this place we passed the Autumn.”
At this place, too, the plot began to thicken in a manner which throws light upon Count Guiccioli’s character. He wrote proposing that Byron should lend him £1000; and when Byron refused to do anything of the kind, seeing that the Count was a richer man than he, he demanded that the Countess should return to him; so that letters of October 29 and November 8 contain these significant passages:
“Count G. comes to Venice next week, and I am requested to consign his wife to him, which shall be done—with all her linen.”
“Count G. has arrived in Venice, and has presented his spouse (who had preceded him two months for her health and the prescriptions of Dr. Aglietti) with a paper of conditions, regulations of hours and conduct and morals, &c., which he insists on her accepting, and she persists in refusing. I am expressly, it would seem, excluded by this treaty, as an indispensable preliminary; so that they are in high discussion, and what the result may be I know not, particularly as they are consulting friends.”